well, I suppose technically they do own the broadcast, but still. hope you managed to check it out.
I am so freaking sick that I can't breathe, coughing my face off, and I think someone beat the shit out of me with a sledgehammer last night when I was sleeping. see you in a few days when I come out of my ibuprofen haze,
vvb
it's the performance PLUS the win... I cried. it felt like someone I knew was on stage.
(excerpts from a birthday note)
I just went out on a pier and threw a bunch of hot pink roses into the ocean. It was freezing. But as I stood there, the blaze of winter sunlight on the water made everything glitter uncontrollably, and I went from sad to kind of peaceful. I thought, that's it, right there, that sparkle I couldn't look away from - that's the Universe. That's about as close to a god as I'm going to get. And two of the roses hooked together and floated away from the rest, and I knew that everything was okay, even if just for that moment.
I came back to the car and looked out where I had stood, that huge long fishing pier sticking out from the rocks at the shore - and I realized that I had been a photograph. All alone in the cold sunshine, way at the end, flinging roses and hope and heartbreak out onto the waves...
It's no accident that the anniversary of my mom's death is the same as Denise's mom's, the same as Kristin's birthday, and that makes me never have to be alone with it. Just like my dad dying on Christmas, I'm lucky enough to have things on both of those horribly painful days that push me into gratitude and celebration.
Again, and I really believe it, there are no coincidences. Well, once in a while I suppose, but 99% of them are exactly what they are supposed to be and they aren't by chance at all. At least in my world they're not.
I miss you, mom.
vvb
What the fuck.
So back before Christmas, I got an email from one of the local coffeehouses asking if I wanted to do a show in March. They were booked up pretty far into the year, but had an unexpected opening, and I was all awed and flattered to get asked. To say that the 'cool kids' run this place is an understatement - not cool to me, but to themselves, you know? All townie politics and whatever.
I go to confirm last week, and the circumstance has nothing to do with the girl I am in contact with, I've known her forever and it's not her doing or anything - but she informs me this morning that if I want to do an opening after 5 pm (because I'll get a lot of people to come at 3:00 on a Tuesday, right?) that it will cost me a "small fee, $15/hr. for me to be there, $8/hr for a barista, and $25 to cover the cost of being open". Cover the cost of being open? What does that even mean? Seriously! Mind you, when I did the show at Koffee, it cost me $700.00 in printing and frames (without a cent figured in for all my labor) and I wound up getting two sales and a wedding out of it, so I came out ahead. So I'm in the same predicament, what I want to do this time is do huge 20x30 prints, I'm going to string together 5 of them to form a huge reprint of a sunrise I took in Cabo (so that will be like, 8 feet long) and then maybe about 8 more prints, and they run about $50 each printed and drymounted. Oh, ps, that's almost $700.00! Which I have decided to make - on yet another credit card purchase - in the name of exposure and investment. And then I can pimp these to some more shows, so I'll be left with portable, beautiful, huge artwork, but still.
As an aside, it's about -5 degrees with the wind chill today. It's fucking retarded.
So, had my horoscope not been so enthusiastic about creative opportunities this month, I may have not even sat here considering still doing it. I want to yell and bitch and commit to the show and back out three days before I'm supposed to hang. So nice to have all this free space in my head, now I can get all riled up about stuff that's happening now instead of stuff last week or last month or whatever.
I was writing at the laundromat yesterday, and now I see why morning pages are about writing - not typing. That shit was a whole other ballgame.
So I guess I need to go write... right?
xx
vvb
clickety clickety nails on the keyboard, you can be the office type / or like to strip - been amusing myself with some gangster rap lately, holy crap. It's all hos and stuff, who's pimping, who's got Gucci-something... quite a change up. Then I heard Glen Hansard on the radio this morning and longed for the movie I haven't seen yet -
I went to therapy last night for the first time in a month. I had completely regressed to the point of insanity, I've been thinking and writing and "what's wrong with me"ing myself into a freaking coma, and Roxanne looked at me last night with such concern and love and said:
"It must be hard to miss your mom so much."
I looked up from a mountain of Kleenex and was just totally dumbfounded. I have been so caught in what am I doing wrong, am I not going to enough meetings, I don't know how to meditate, I am terrified and anxious all the time, and I can't get anything done - anything - I have a show in three weeks and I haven't done a thing about it - I get all paralyzed and then upset and worried about everything I'm having a hard time doing because nothing is getting done... once all the anger went away that's what was left. And so obviously I know that the anniversary of my mother's death is coming up, but I didn't want to give it any energy, and when I get stressed out this is what happens, and I'm not good enough, and everybody else has it figured out but me... so I thought this was just the same shit and therefore meant that I hadn't gone anywhere or gotten any better - but it turns out that this is my poor excuse for coping skills. I keep tying it to all these other things, but what's really going on is that under enormous amounts of strain I tie the effects that the stress is having on me to something external, to everything external, besides the thing that is causing it. I'm so used to feeling not good enough and not skinny enough and all that that it's a natural thing for me. And Roxanne, who doesn't know me well on the grand scope of the Universe, can see it as clear as day, as clearly as I can see certain facets of alcoholism, as clearly as we can see shit manifesting in other people that they can't put together. It was all like early AA, where she was like, would I steer you wrong? Have I steered you wrong? Has this worked so far? Then why would I start lying to you now?
She wouldn't. I don't have perspective. It's like I'm in an abusive relationship with myself that I can't see. And I wonder why I feel like I've been shot in the face and beaten half to death, and suddenly I look down and I'm the one holding the bat, waking up, wondering what happened.
So, just like last year, I'm not crazy or not good enough or any of those things. I'm a girl, a woman, who lost both of her parents and misses her mom. Who feels like she doesn't have any family left that's not insane or drunk, because she doesn't. Who was thrown from a warm living room and suburban Sunday dinners out into the road like a stray cat. And I can feel like all that and be upset about all that because it is all true and it's all really happening. And I'm not a retard for something that I find so trivial, or that I don't want to push energy into, to be affecting me so much. It's out of my control.
I'm all crying and like, Roxanne, I have four dollars in my account and she's like, well, last time you didn't have money you came anyway, and then when you got money you paid me, so why can't we keep doing that?
Okay.
Bills are hard, money's tough, we went from Raf making a grand a week to being lucky that he's got inside work for the wintertime, so it's hard. I switched jobs, I made choices to be happy instead of rich for a while, and I've got to sacrifice to make the investment into working here because it could - it should - turn into something great.
Wow. There's a lot of free space in my head right now, I just looked out the window and there was dead silence.
I guess I'll keep coming, right?
vvb
So much for NaNovella... I haven't found the time to answer emails, much less start a book. I know, excuses, excuses, I haven't made the time. That's more accurate. But in my defense, I have worked for the last bunch of days straight through with no reprieve, it's not like I've been sitting on my ass thinking about writing and just not doing it.
I was thinking about starting my biography. Because I'm so important. Is that an auto-biography? Or is that when someone else writes it for you?
This morning, I am a victim of poor planning: a teensy 8 ounces of fruit for a mere three dollars... it's robbery. (These pancakes are very robbery!) I have to go to the store.
So I haven't written in a few days, and I don't really know what I have to say. I spoke at a meeting last night, and it's maybe one of two or three times in all the times I've spoken at meetings where I feel like I did a good job. There wasn't any bullshit, any trying to be anything else other than who and what I am, which usually happens when I stop paying attention. It wasn't a free-for-all where you can talk about yourself for 45 minutes and just hold the meeting hostage, it was talk for a half hour and then pick a topic - which seems harder at first, but what winds up happening for me is that I cut out a lot of bullshit. I talked about when my recovery started, not when my sobriety started. I talked about all the different places in my head in the patches of time that have passed... a little bit of what it used to be like, and how I got sober, but - it just came out different than it usually does. I felt really real and really awkward but I was real about being awkward, if that makes any sense. And I realized how much I bitch and get upset about all kinds of stuff that turns my head inside out, but really, I don't have it so bad. I'm so all victim to self pity these days. Once I don't have so much time on my hands, it gets a lot better.
People feeding their children brownies for breakfast. Seriously. How about all up at the counter asking their kids what they want - how about you're going to get what I say you're going to get, because I said so? It's like they are generating piles of toxic waste. Here's a brownie, here's a five dollar hot chocolate... fuck, and here's the little group of people who talk all loud in here in the mornings. Whatevs.
So today I've got to go to the gym, pay rent, get laundry and the rest of the bills done, and maybe work this afternoon or maybe not until tomorrow, which is fine by me. I think I worked almost 14 hours between Saturday and Sunday, plus speaking in Stamford, plus Super Bowl Insanity 4000. I ate a hot dog. It was kind of gross.
I've changed my desktop to a giant photograph of part of the Earth from a satellite, hopefully it will keep me in perspective a little bit better - I'll take whatever I can get.... What else... I know there's other stuff hiding behind things in the back of my head someplace.
It's been a big adjustment, in more than just the obvious ways, getting used to my life as-is (I think they call that one "accepting life on life's terms", hmph)... I talked about it a little bit last night, I get sober, and then I try to get all my outsides alright, and then I begin my actual recovery, and then my mom gets sick and everything starts to shift right when I'm at the peak of really coming into my own skin - and then all my energy went to that, and then my mom dies, and then the relationship with Raf started at the turn of all that too - it's like the world is coming back into focus yet another time after getting the freaking shit kicked out of me. So I was all trotting along, trying things on, getting a real sense of who I am and where I'm going, and then all of a sudden someone hog ties me and throws a bag over my head and puts me on a plane and I get off it alone in the middle of France. And not in a good way, maybe let's say I landed in a remote anonymous desert. All not knowing how to survive and which way to head towards and all that. And I've finally found my way, but I'm different now, and everything's different, like someone coming back from war or being stranded on an island, not really quite sure of whether or not they're going to make it. Tom Hanks when he gets back from wherever he was in that movie with the volleyball. You get what I mean.
So I guess I'm all reacclimating or something, I don't know how much or when it stops, I guess we all are in some form or another because we keep changing and we keep re-adjusting to the world around us.
Wow. I got all deep there for a second. All typing my morning away like I've got nothing to do. Time to go clear some stuff off the list.
vvb
